Novelist Scott Sigler's horror column appears every Thursday.

"Looks aren't everything." What's true in love doesn't really hold true in horror movies -- especially in monster flicks. You can have a great story, but if you back it up with a monster that is so fake your ten-year-old nephew says it looks "kinda retarded," the scare is gone. And now that Hollywood effects legend Stan Winston has passed on, the world is a poorer place without him. One of the great "lookers" in the history of movies, we're talking royalty when we speak of Stan. Royalty. You doubt the term? Too grandiose? Take a gander at the killer movie monsters developed by Winston:

• The Alien
• The Terminator
• The Predator
• All that long-toothed goodness in Jurassic Park

It's one thing to develop a monster. It's another thing to make the monster a focal point in a successful movie, or even a franchise. And then it's a separate level entirely to make creations that don't just do the things mentioned above, but elevate beyond celluloid and become embedded in our culture. Winston didn't just create monsters, he created icons. These creatures have surpassed simple moviedom and ascended into the embedded consciousness of our culture, joining immortal staples like Dracula, the Mummy, Frankenstein and the Wolfman.

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